As usual during the last weeks of the year, I’m reminding everyone to consider contributing to charity. This year, this is especially so since you may not be able to get any tax benefit from charitable contributions next year, making you less inclined to contribute.

This year I encourage you to contribute to charities that are invested in keeping our politicians honest (as much as they reasonably can), and provide help to those hurting. In addition, do consider the natural disasters (which seem to be more and more frequent and disastrous, but it’s all natural, nothing is man-made).

Here’s the list of my favorite charities for this year (confirm with your tax adviser on the tax deduction eligibility):

Planned Parenthood Federation of America – An organization dedicated to providing accessible and affordable healthcare options for women. Women can choose for themselves what care they need, they don’t need old white men to decide for them. But they might need help making that care affordable and accessible, so let’s provide that help to those who need it.

And of course, if you want to be able to research the charities – consider also CharityNavigator.org which provides a lot of useful information and metrics about various charities, and is in itself a charity organization.

Have a happy new year, merry whatever it is you’re celebrating, and consider continuing your charitable givings even if they are no longer deductible.

I suggest the readers to read Michael’s analysis as it summarizes the key points very well with excellent examples. It also addresses the issue I raised in my last article – the step-up basis remains intact even with the estate tax repeal, which is a huge windfall for the rich.

My bottom line: mixed benefits for the middle class. Some popular deductions and exemptions will be lost, but others increased and made more useful.

People in traditionally Democratic-leaning states will probably see tax increases because of the SALT deduction limitations, fringe benefits reduction and mortgage interest deduction limitation. Although some impact may be mitigated by the AMT repeal. In any case, these people are of no consequence for the Republicans, so they’re easy target.

The very wealthy (people who own >$20MM) are definitely benefiting. The tax rate reductions will affect them the most, they will likely benefit from the AMT repeal, and from the 25% rate for the passive pass-through income. Reduced corporate tax rate will also help the wealthy as more money will be available to withdraw as dividends. The beneficial treatment of cash repatriation is also a benefit for mostly the very wealthy investors.

In fact, the real estate investors will gain the most. The 25% pass-through income reduces the tax rate of the rental income for high earners by up to 14.6%. The reduction of the property tax and mortgage deductions (and essentially eliminating them for most of the taxpayers) will also be most beneficial for large-scale real estate investors since it dis-incentivizes home ownership. That means more people will stay as renters instead of trying to get their own place – more passive (25% rate) income for the real estate sharks.

One might think the law was written to specifically benefit some wealthy real-estate magnates.

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The new tax plan recently announced by the politicians has caught my eye with one thing in particular – the repeal of the estate tax.

Most people think that the estate tax doesn’t affect them. With the $5.49M exemption per person, most people won’t have enough assets at the time of their deaths to actually pay the tax.

However, that’s not the only effect the tax has on estate beneficiaries. And repealing it will not only help the rich save on the tax payments, but will also increase the tax burden on the middle-class families that inherit assets from their parents.

How? Three words: stepped up basis. Which will disappear together with the estate tax itself.

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The Republican Presidential nominee is apparently not as shrewd a businessman as he wants everyone to believe. It has been published that on his 1995 tax return he reported total accumulated losses of almost $1B!

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether they want to install a president who alone reported almost 2% of total losses reported by individuals in the United States for that year. After all, he runs a campaign based on his credibility as a businessman and promising fixing the US debt and deficit problems, so his staggering net loss in the 1990’s must attest to his experience in that field… Not for success, though. But that’s politics.

Let’s talk about the loss itself. How does it work, and why it is actually good for us to have that mechanism in general.

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It’s been a while since I saw advertisements on Facebook that were not in form of click-baits or Takei’s promoted posts. And Facebook didn’t like that.

So they decided to circumvent ad filters and force the spam on me even though the clearly recognize that the whole reason people like me use ad filters was because the ads provide little to no value to us.

Clearly, they think they can boost revenue by degrading the user experience. Well, what can I do?

Click on all the ads.

Yes, they’ll get paid for that, but the more people do that – the more advertisers will realize that the Facebook “high” CTR doesn’t lead to any conversions, and in fact is causing them to lose customers instead of gaining them.

I don’t really care if Facebook earns more money or not. In fact, if they do – good for them. More money to Zuckerberg’s charity, for all I care. But if a large enough volume of advertisers realize that they’re paying for nothing and the clicks they’re getting are useless – maybe they will force Facebook to be more user-friendly?

Or maybe we all move to Google+ after all?

In any case – if you can’t escape it, click it. If the advertisers think it is a good use for their money to force me memorize what companies and products I’m not going to pay for – that’s their choice.

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Today is the Amazon traditional “Prime day” sale. Tons of promotions are going on, and if you look carefully enough you may catch a glimpse of that rare beast called “a real deal!”.

If you don’t yet have a Prime account – you can try Amazon Prime 30-Day Free Trial. There are some nice discounts going on, but do your own due diligence and compare prices.

Worth noting, that competitors have sales of their own. Walmart, for example, provides free shipping on any order. Target has already started the end-of-summer/back-to-college sales. Google Express has a 3-months trial that you can try to have deliveries from the local brick-and-mortar stores, if you don’t like what Amazon is doing to the retail market.

While on the topic of Amazon and sales, pay attention to this piece of news. Apparently, Amazon are silently experimenting with the “list price” notion. Or rather, lack of it. Many sellers use the “list price” (or the MSRP – Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) to show how big their discount is, without revealing that the “list price” has never been the actual price for the item. In many cases, as noted in the article I linked to, the manufacturers themselves sell below their own MSRP prices.

What it means is that when you see “50% off”, it may not actually be half the “regular” price. It may be half the MSRP price, which no-one in fact sells at. So even when you see the “original” prices stricken out – do your own due diligence and compare prices on different sites. Including the manufacturer’s. Check the local retailers. You may be surprised by the results. In some cases, you may get the item cheaper in a brick-and-mortar shop next to you rather than online.

Enjoy your shopping!

Your Little Advisor.

PS: 712 (7/12) is not a prime number. However, 127 (12/7) is. 12/7 is July 12th as written in most of the European countries.